Three Ways to Prioritize Your SEO

Erin Everhart, writer for SearchEngineWatch.com clearly lays out an effective way for businesses to prioritize their website SEO efforts.

Everhart says that the most successful SEOs — the ones who get the most links, garner the most traffic, and reap the benefits from outlined and specific updates — are the ones who’ve mastered it.

Here are three ways to prioritize your own SEO efforts, given by Everhart:

1. Define Your Goals

When you’re thinking through what you want to accomplish, focus on business goals rather than SEO goals. For example, instead of focusing on the keyword with the highest average search volume, focus on your best-selling product/service (or the one with the greatest profit margin). Everhart says that an incremental increase to the latter will bring a greater business impact than a larger increase to the former.

• Bad Goal: Increase ranking and organic traffic for “sofas”
• Good Goal: See 15% increase in sales for “leather sectional sofas”
• Bad Goal: Increase thought leadership in industry
• Good Goal: Bring a 25% increase in page views and 10% increase in blog subscription

Everhart reminds us that a goal must contain a qualitative aspect so you can properly measure it, report on it, and determine if you’ve achieved it.

2. Audit Your Site

Once you know what you want your site to do, determine where you’re at in making that happen. What optimization, if any, has already been done? What areas need to be improved? Where are you currently ranked for relevant keywords? Which competitors are outranking you and what are they doing?

Prioritization will also need to happen within the audit itself. When you’re determining what to change and when, Everhart asks us to think of these four things:

• How much time and resources will this change take?
• How much impact will this change have for SEO? For the overall business?
• How long will it take to see that impact?

3. Implement on a Small Scale

Although Everhart reminds us that prioritizing your SEO may be the hardest part of any SEO job, the most frustrating things is that you cannot always know for sure the results. You can hypothesize and predict what you think it may be, but the fact of the matter is that we have no idea what search engines really pay attention or how long it will take to see the results.

Instead of making drastic changes to every part of your site, Everhart tells us the implement these changes on a small scale, Perhaps start with changing some title tags.

Test it against the original, and if it works, roll it out to other sections. If it doesn’t, diagnose the problem, determine why, and test again. This is especially beneficial if you’re working on large website with tons on URLs.

At Five Technology, we can help your business with its Internet marketing and SEO needs in order to be seen and heard through search engines. Let’s chat to get started!

Read the full article by Erin Everhart.